Tag Archives: chip butty

The British sense of humour is world-renowned for being, well…different. You only have to be familiar with Monty Python or The Office to realise that slapstick is not our National style. And whereas we buy a lot of our dramas and documentaries from the US (some would say ‘most’), we still seem to prefer home-grown laughs to imported ones.

You’d think that would make British humour hard to export, but apparently not. The Office has gone global (with the original generally more popular than the remakes) and Monty Python is quoted wherever you go (who knows, maybe they even sing the Spam song on the space station, too).

Red Dwarf is a tricky one to describe if you’ve never seen it. If I said it was set on a spaceship, you might think it’s a Sci-fi series, but most of the humour is really about the people. Although technically, there is only one person; Lister, a lowly Liverpudlian technician who survived in stasis for three million years after the rest of the crew were killed. Thankfully, though he also has for company Holly (the ship’s sometimes-chirpy, sometimes depressed, slightly senile computer), Rimmer (a hologram of his hated former neurotic, pedantic boss), Kryten (the mechanoid butler) and Cat (who although he looks human actually evolved over the 3 million years from Lister’s cat). There you go – I haven’t even described their adventures yet and you’re already either thinking “that’s ridiculous. I’d rather watch a re-re-re-re-re-run of Friends” or “that’s ridiculous! I need to see that!”.

And, if you’re one of the latter camp, maybe you can! Because although Red Dwarf has been off air since 1999, some utter genius has commissioned a three-part special where the Red Dwarf team head back to Earth; and I have three of the DVD’s to give away!

Here’s a sneak preview…containing the non-human ship’s crew attempting a conversation in a Northern dialect (plus a reference to chip butties).

All you need to do to win is leave a comment here and next Saturday, 31st October, I’ll pick three names at random.